Black Beauty: His Grooms and Companions.

SEWELL, Anna.

Item Number: 137621

Boston: The American Humane Education Society, 1890.

First American edition of Sewell’s classic Black Beauty. Quarto, original wrappers, engraved title-page vignette, introductory chapter dated 12 February 1890, advertisement on preliminary page dated 1 March 1890, head- and tail-pieces, engraved initials. In very good condition. Bookplate Housed in a custom clamshell box. Rare.

Sewell “was told in 1871 that she had only 18 months to live; by the end of that year she had begun Black Beauty, her only book, and five years later she was still alive and at work on it.” Sewell had great difficulty in finding a publisher and sales at first were slow. “She lived to see the book published, but died a few months later, before she could know of its huge success… Black Beauty was the most celebrated animal story of the 19th century, an account of a horse’s experiences at the hands of many owners… The book revived the ‘animal biography,’ a genre popular in the late 18th and early 19th centuries but which had been dormant for half a century” (Carpenter & Prichard, 66, 479).